Brothers Judd Top 100 of the 20th Century: Novels (21)

[L]et's speak a little about symbols. We may
as well, as there has hardly been a critic who has not
referred to The Roots of Heaven as a symbolic
novel. I can only state firmly and rather hopelessly
that it is nothing of the sort. It has been
said that my elephants are really symbols of freedom, of
African independence. Or that they are the
last individuals threatened with extinction in our
collective, mechanized, totalitarian society.
Or that these almost mythical beasts evoke in this
atheistical age an infinitely bigger and more powerful
Presence. Or, then again, that they are an
allegory of mankind itself menaced with nuclear
extinction. There is almost no limit to what you
can make an elephant stand for, but if the image
of this lovable pachyderm thus becomes for each of
us a sort of Rorschach test--which was exactly my
intention--this does not make him in the least
symbolic. It only goes to prove that each
of us carries in his soul and mind a different notion of
what is essential to our survival, a different longing
and a personal interpretation, in the largest
sense, of what life preservation is about.
-Romain
Gary, Author's Introduction to the 1964 Time-Life Books version of
The
Roots of Heaven

It is one of the peculiarities of great literature, that having created
it, the author sometimes loses control of it. Thus, Don
Quijote, the first and greatest novel of Western Literature, may have
been intended by Cervantes to be a devastating parody of the chivalric
tales, but instead of making us scoff at the Don's antiquated ideas, the
book gave us the quintessential romantic idealist hero. Similarly,
when he wrote his Prix Goncourt winning book The Roots of Heaven,
Romain Gary may have thought that he had crafted a novel of immense ambiguity,
but readers have had little trouble finding in this tale of the French
dentist Morel and his mad quest to save the elephants of Africa, a fairly
straightforward metaphor for the struggle to preserve freedom.

Morel has come to a French Equatorial Africa which, in the wake of WWII,
is percolating with unrest as the natives begin to agitate for independence.
Meanwhile, the European settlers who developed the territory wish to hold
on to what they've created. Added to the mix are various and sundry
missionaries, anthropologists, prostitutes, traders, hunters, army deserters,
and the like, who have all washed up in the colony.

Morel starts out by trying to get folks to sign a petition in favor
of the elephants, but when he is met with scorn and indifference, he takes
matters into his own hands and begins a campaign of low-grade (non-lethal)
terrorism against those who hunt the animals. He quickly becomes
the most wanted man in the colony, and then a legendary figure to the whole
world. He is a hero to many, a traitorous and dangerous figure to
the authorities, and a convenient opportunity to the rebels. People,
with widely varying motives, including fomenting revolution, begin to join
his crusade. At one point, when he is still petitioning, he explains
to the local barmaid/prostitute, Minna, how he came to champion the elephant
:

I first began thinking about the elephants during
the war, when I was a prisoner in Germany,
probably because they were the most different thing
I could imagine from what surrounded me :
they were the very image of immense liberty.
Every time we looked at the barbed wire or were
almost dying of misery and claustrophobia in solitary
confinement, we tried to think of those big
animals marching irresistibly through the open spaces
of Africa, and it made us feel better. Barely
alive, starved, exhausted, we would clench our teeth
and follow our great free herds obstinately with
our eyes, and see them march across the savanna
and over the hills, and we could almost hear the
earth tremble under that living mass of freedom.
We tried not to speak of it, for fear the guards
would notice, and sometimes we would just look at
each other and wink, and then we knew that it
was all right, that we could still see it, that
it was still alive in us. We held on to the image of that
gigantic liberty, and somehow it helped us to survive.

So regardless of Gary's supposed intent, Morel's own words, here and
throughout the book, would seem to indicate that he himself sees the elephants
as symbol's of freedom.

It would have been easy enough for Gary to simply turn Morel into an
unalloyed hero, a classic freedom fighter, but he does not. Gary
refers to Morel as an extremist of hope, and the emphasis is equally placed
on the extremism. A Jesuit priest in the novel, loosely
modeled on Tielhard de Chardin, quite accurately indicts Morel for elevating
the idea of the elephants above even his fellow man. I think it's
the priest who points out that Morel has chosen to place his hopes in the
elephants because they are without sin, and the inability to accept Man's
nature which this choice reflects is at heart anti-human. In addition,
Gary does not simply demonize those who oppose Morel; many of them are
just as idealistic as he. One of the best set speeches in the book
comes from one of the colonists, whose elephant hunting wife Morel has
just sentenced to a public flogging :

I know the tune. The elephants, you say.
But it's only Europeans who have hunting weapons and
who can afford permits, and what you mean is that
we are the only people who are exploiting and
exhausting Africa's natural wealth. That's
a tune I've heard ever since I've been here, but the truth is
that Africa's wealth isn't exploited enough, and
that without us it wouldn't be exploited at all, and its
very existence would be unknown. Without us,
the so-called 'colonists'--and I'm not ashamed of that
name--not a single vein of ore would be discovered,
and the population wouldn't have doubled in
twenty years. When I arrived here I found
only syphilis, leprosy and sleeping sickness : I cured my
people, fed them, clothed them, gave them work,
houses and ambition--the desire to do what we do.
It's men like me who have been, and still are, the
leaven of Africa. You and your lot call that
'shameless exploitation of Africa's natural wealth';
I call it building up a new Africa for all, and first
of all for the Africans. But because ivory
was the first thing we were after when we came here at
the turn of the century and because we're the only
ones to hunt with modern weapons, you've
thought it smart to make elephant hunting the symbol
of capitalist exploitation.

Now this assessment of Morel's motives is quite wrong, but it's important
for a couple of reasons. First, it presents a legitimate defense
of the colonists. Second, the very misunderstanding reflects the
reason why, even though Morel is generally a sympathetic figure, the Europeans
may be right to resist him, because even though his motives may be pure,
others can warp them to their own ends.

One of the characters explains the title of the book this way :

Our needs--for justice, for freedom and dignity--are
roots of heaven that are deeply imbedded in
our hearts, but of heaven itself men know nothing
but the gripping roots...

The ferocity with which Morel clings to this sentiment and the absurd
grandeur of his fight make him one of the more unforgettable heroes in
all of literature and one whom it's odd to find in a French novel.
Then again, as another charcter says of him :

I believe Morel was defending a certain idea of decency--the
way we are treated on this earth filled
him with indignation. At bottom, he was an
Englishman without knowing it.

The book is not currently in print and it's not easy to find, but it's
well worth the effort.